The Shop: The University Of Melbourne, 1850-1939

Early female undergraduates at Melbourne University. It was nearly 30 years after the university was founded that female students were first admitted, in 1879.

THE SHOP: THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, 1850-1939By R.J.W. SelleckMelbourne University Press, $80

Institutions make us. In Melbourne, few institutions have mattered more than the University of Melbourne, which turned 150 years old this year. It is up there with the government, the law, the churches, the leading newspapers and the MCG.

In a culture that has many roots but not much of a past, the 150th anniversary offers the university a piece of the tradition - so valuable to educational authority - that its British forbears possess in greater abundance. In The Shop, Dick Selleck tells the story of its first 90 years (1850-1939) in a brilliantly sustained and many-sided investigation of its growth. It is also a delightful story: funny, reflective and profound.

It would be stretching the comparison to say the issues facing the small and socially elite university before 1939 are the same ones faced by today's large, complex, mass (and still elite) university in the global knowledge economy. But in The Shop are many echoes of the present; and much of today's university is there in embryo.

"The Shop" was the long-lasting slang for the university, first heard in the 1870s, part of a confident private language used by students cynical about the gap between Elysian scholarly ideals and more prosaic realities. The Shop was a place where you could buy a degree. (Perhaps the term is about to come back!)

The early days were dominated by the anti-hero of Selleck's account, the University Council. Limited in vision, it was marred by squalid trench warfare over personal status. When put to the test on academic freedom it usually failed. The council supported staff and students who spoke up for the status quo, in politics or culture, and it sacrificed the radicals and bohemians to the newspapers or abandoned them to the student mob.

The university achieved critical mass in the decade of Marvellous Melbourne, the 1880s, and survived the slump that followed.

The first professors were young men selected by a London committee at 25 to 30 years of age after showing promise at Oxford, Cambridge or Trinity College Dublin. They married on the strength of their new salary and sailed to Melbourne to found a field of study. The first council decided there were four essential branches of knowledge: the Classics (Greek, Latin, ancient history), mathematics, natural sciences and the Humanities (modern history, literature, political economy and logic). Law, medicine and other science-based professions started later; a full-scale engineering degree began only in 1888.

The council ignored professors William Hearn and William Wilson, who argued that the university was ill-fitted for the compulsory teaching of the classics, that this would inhibit parents who wanted a useful education for their children, and "the more closely that colonial universities resembled those of the mother country, the greater is the probability of their failure".

At first the university struggled to define itself. It was dependent on government and mostly short of cash. It failed to find cultural markers in the settler society around it and was uncomfortable with those elements in which colonial originality lay: the talent for improvisation and the raw democratic spirit. Until 1900, every building erected on the Parkville grounds faced inwards to each other rather than outwards to the rougher world. It oscillated between, on one hand, Oxford and Cambridge; on the other, the Scottish and American universities and the newer British foundations.

The result was a long legacy of insularity and an umbilical attachment to Britain. The university remained separated from industry and indifferent to Asia, attitudes that would not be shared by the newer universities that emerged after World War II.

The early University of Melbourne was bigger than its rival in Sydney, though the latter was to benefit from more generous bequests. The university achieved critical mass in the decade of Marvellous Melbourne, the 1880s, and survived the slump that followed. As it grew, it found expectations of universities were changing. Still expected to be socially and culturally conservative, they now had to be intellectually modern as well.

Selleck traces the long struggles to overthrow the primacy of the classics, to establish research, to admit women as students (1879) and as members of council (1913), and to professionalise administration. Even when it was discovered in 1901 that affable accountant Frederick Dickson had stolen £23,839 over six years - equivalent to 161 per cent of the annual government grant - this did not overcome professorial resistance to a full-time salaried vice-chancellor. It was not until 1935 that Raymond Priestly took office. Though bedevilled by chancellor and government, he made a great difference.

Research began in the natural sciences before spreading to medicine and engineering. Much of the research strength of today's medical faculty dates from the Walter and Eliza Hall bequest in 1911. Selleck situates individuals critically, in their context and in ours, but there is no doubt that the warts-and-all heroes of The Shop are scholar-teachers such as Hearn and Edward Jenks in law, and pioneer researchers such as Orme Masson in chemistry, Baldwin Spencer in biology and anthropology, Charles Martin and Richard Berry in medicine, Thomas Lyle and the tempestuous Thomas Laby in physics.

There were no women, though 43-year-old Ethel McLennan probably should have been appointed to a professorial chair in 1938. Priestly noted in his diary that though McLennan was a good botanist, he was inclined "to plump for a young strong man if we can get one". It was to be another four decades before the first woman professor.

Selleck enters the different knowledge worlds for us, mapping their power and limits, particularly the life sciences and the arts. He is strong when exploring class, gender and indigenous cultures, though there is less on the environment.

There are many memorable accounts: Bella Guerin, the first woman graduate, a socialist feminist who opposed World War I; the conflicts over Walter Burley Griffin's design for Newman College and the opening of St Mary's as an "adjunct" to the men's college; the impassioned Public Lecture Theatre debate on the Spanish Civil War in 1937; Berry's research in eugenics; and Spencer on indigenous cultures in central Australia. Spencer never broke with social Darwinism, and urged the stealing of the stolen generation, but despite himself "he became fascinated by Aboriginal culture for its own sake". His findings influenced Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud.

The most poignant story is of George Marshall-Hall, professor of music, the founder of the conservatorium who contributed much to music in Melbourne, with an impish delight in the sacrilegious and an irregular personal life, the friend of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, the strident critic who could not bear criticism himself. "In his world there was only light and darkness, and he was the source of light." In 1900, he was hounded out by The Argus, The Age, the private schools and a tied vote on council. Marshall-Hall was reappointed in 1914 but the edge was gone. He died soon after.

Simon Marginson is an Australian Professorial Fellow in the faculty of education at Monash University and author of Monash: Reinventing the University (Allen & Unwin, 2000).